Translations of contemporary poetry are a kind of dust-sheet. Beneath it, the reader tries to distinguish the solid furniture. [Arthur Boyars and Simon Franklin, the] translators of Yevtushenko's new collection of more than 60 poems [The Face behind the Face], have chosen an idiomatic dust-sheet: plain English, the rhythms prosaic rather than spoken or sung. They have not attempted any approximation to Yevtushenko's forms or metres. It is his matter, his images, his ideas that we experience, without the prosodic tact that harmonises them and elevates the commonplace, the opinion, into memorable and occasionally self-transcending language. Before we look for the face behind the face, we have to locate the poem behind the translation.

I think I recognise several fine poems concealed here. The best may be 'Love of Solitude', about an old woman in Budapest who is devoted to Russian poetry and lives alone with it. 'I love...